Facebook - business or personal?

April 22, 2012 3:55 PM

Two Facebook accounts: one personal, one business. What are the risks?

I've been asked to create a Facebook page for a department in my institution. I already have a personal account. In this circumstance, I understand that Facebook wants people to create pages using their personal account (and use that personal account to administer the page).

However, if a page is created using a business account, and that business account is created from a different (work) email address, what is the likelihood that this will cause trouble for the accounts or the page later?

I guess what I'm asking is whether the "one account per person and one person per account" is strictly enforced, or if it's one of those things that everyone does anyway because it's difficult for FB to detect.

A follow-up question as well: I'm aware that other pages have been created with this method already. Should admin rights for the page be transferred over to a personal account and the duplicate business account be deleted, or is it no big deal?

posted by Paragon to computers & internet (7 answers total)

I work at a digital marketing agency. My coworkers and i do this all the time because we need to set up and monitor accounts for our clients, or because we want to be able to monitor our clients competitors, all without muddling it in with our personal accounts.

And y'know what happens? Absolutely nothing.

Unless you start using one of those accounts to spam people or post offensive content, its not going to draw the attention of any of the 'rule keepers' at facebook. Don't worry about it.

(As for the admin rights thing, its probably better to keep that with the business account just so that you can give a coworker access if needed.)
posted by Kololo at 4:01 PM on April 22, 2012

I know teachers who do this (a public page because their schools want them to be hip, and available to students to friend....and a private page because they don't actually want to get fired because a student discovers they're an adult who drinks alcohol sometimes....anyway).

None of them have had ANY problems.

If you are worried, see if your boss/dept head has an account. If they don't, see if they wouldn't mind you putting their name to it.
posted by Lt. Bunny Wigglesworth at 4:47 PM on April 22, 2012

I would actually recommend creating a dummy or fake account to administer the business page. I manage a number of business pages, and I've had problems with one page in particular that has multiple admins. One of the admins has had his account hacked, and whoever or whatever hacked it removed all admins from the business page (including me). It was a dangerous situation, because the company could have lost control of the page (it's a billion-dollar company). He didn't change the password on his account, so the same thing, incredibly, happened again.

It would be safer to just use a single admin account for the page, and that is probably what we are going to do.
posted by KokuRyu at 5:11 PM on April 22, 2012

I'm a privacy professional. I highly recommend creating a dummy account to administer your company Facebook page. Don't mix your work life and personal life. It's a bad idea, with few if any benefits.

Facebook really can't tell the difference between one person with two accounts, and two people with the same or similar names. Unless the name you use on your dummy account is wacky (e.g., Count Von Awesome Ninja Monkey), and they ban you on the basis that your name is obviously fake, or you start spamming people, you'll be fine.

Someone could report that you have multiple accounts, and that might cause Facebook to delete your account, but really, who's going to do that?

So go ahead - create your 'business' Facebook account. You won't have any problems. If you're concerned, just have multiple admins for the page - then, if your dummy account gets deleted, you'll still be able to administer the page.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:24 PM on April 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

I have two Facebooks, one for my 'professional' persona and one for my personal stuff. The personal one is pretty much 'if I know you, you can see it', the professional one I created initially to test some crossposting things from Wordpress, and kept because it's not a bad idea. The professional one is under my full name as it appears on my resume, has a link from my professional-facing website, and a different email address (which is the same as my professional job-hunting email address) as the login.

If you know me, you can probably find both of them, but if anyone asked I'd tell them the truth: I created it for testing and kept it as a professional representation for things that aren't shared with my friends.

And it's been that way for more than a year now, and no one's hassled me about it.
posted by mephron at 12:29 AM on April 23, 2012

For those who don't know, there is actually a formal thing called a Business Account intended for this purpose. As it is not a public facing profile, you don't have to worry about confusion or being criticized for having multiple accounts.

Ideally, if there are existing pages, they should add the new business account as an administrator and optionally transfer ownership to that account.
posted by dhartung at 12:04 PM on April 23, 2012

For those who don't know, there is actually a formal thing called a Business Account intended for this purpose.

Thanks, dhartung!
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 8:25 PM on April 23, 2012